Intel Versus Everybody

Gizmos that are connected to the Internet are proliferating wildly. Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini is competing for a piece of every one of them.

Is Intel a monopoly? Leave that sort of question to a lawyer. If you don’t think Intel has competition, however, you haven’t been paying attention.

AMD is back from an excruciating restructuring regimen to battle Intel in notebooks, desktops, and the lucrative server processor market.

ARM and its licensees -- including Qualcomm, Samsung, and Apple -- represent an even bigger threat. They’ve captured the smartphone market Intel desires, have momentum in tablets thanks to Apple’s iPad, and are edging towards a brawl with Intel in the server room.

And those are just the first few layers of the gigantic competition casserole Intel is digging into right now. So when Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini spoke to an audience of thousands of geeks at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco Monday his message had more ingredients than your mom’s fiber-fortified beef-and-bacon enchilada.

There was a demo that involved playing strategy game StarCraft II on a desktop computer. Another demo involved playing a video of that StarCraft session that had been embedded on a Facebook page on a Sony television built around Intel's Atom processor. Then -- finally -- a third demo streamed a scathing commentary of the gameplay from an Intel-powered tablet computer to yet another television.

There were testimonials from big-name customers. Facebook uses Intel’s processors to power its social network. Cisco is putting Intel’s chips in its Cius tablet computer.

And then there were the big numbers. The biggest: there are 2.8 billion smart devices out there right now, Otellini said. That number will double by 2014.

Pretty complicated. Otellini’s theme, however, is simple. Otellini wants Intel’s chips to be the “port of choice.” Translation: Intel wants the silicon brains it manufactures to run not just every kind of software, it wants them to run every kind of software best.

Otellini’s chief weapon: Intel’s manufacturing prowess. Intel can crank out vast numbers of chips that cram more transistors onto a slice of silicon than its competitors. That will let Intel’s processors do work once performed by standalone products built by other companies.

Intel’s latest processor design -- Sandy Bridge, which is due early next year -- is an example. It crams the graphics capabilities once performed by separate processors onto the computer’s brain, lowering power consumption and boosting responsiveness.

The goal is to put a “whole PC,” onto a single piece of silicon, explained David Perlmutter, the executive vice president who co-manages the company’s Intel Architecture Group (see “Hard Core”).